2 December

I reflexively installed 11.2 as soon as I saw it was available. What could go wrong. It’s not like they also rushed that update overnight, to fix a bug that was putting thousands of phones in a reboot loop.

Fuck. It just dawned on me that my four-year-old MacBook Pro has been swelling over the last few weeks. (Or much longer if my issues with the trackpad’s button were the first symptom.) It’s awesome because I’m kinda broke right now.

4 December

My daughter is 5. I don’t want her to have this, and I don’t want her friends to badger her into getting it. This is expanding the Network Effect of Facebook (& all its concomitant pitfalls) into childhood. It’s gross. [twitter.com]

One of my favorite samples from the Progressive GANs paper is this one from the “cat” category. Apparently some of the cat training photos were memes with text. The GAN doesn’t know what text is so it has made up new text-like imagery in the right place for a meme caption.

I’m trialling a new experimental laptop from Apple. The return of USB-A and SD Card slot is genius. Touch screen and pencil support is surprisingly useful. Touch bar is gone but I won’t miss it. Face ID is 👌

8 December

It’s funny how we were all a little worried about High Sierra’s switch to APFS and it seems to be the only thing they didn’t screw up. (Talking general OS reliability, not mis-attributed UI fields in Disk Utility.)

If you weren’t enough of a risk-taker to buy bitcoin at $30, you also aren’t enough of a risk-taker to not have sold it the minute you had multiplied your holdings ten-fold, so don’t beat yourself up over hypotheticals

It’s presumably intended as a workaround for devices going from 60% to shutdown in a few minutes after the iOS 10 update, but I’m gonna be hard-pressed for arguments the next time someone cries “planned obsolescence.”

11 December

12 December

Inside and Gorogoa are now available to pre-order on the App Store, in what appears to be a brand new system Apple has rolled out to allow people to pre-order upcoming iOS games and apps: [toucharcade.com] by @hodapp

Second time I change an iPhone 6’s battery and those adhesive strips are still assholes but INSTAGRAM IS SCROLLING SMOOTHLY AGAIN. (Ish. Feels like they preload images a bit late? But scrolling used to overwhelm the proc so much it would misjudge swipes and skip entire screens.)

15 December

This contemptuous view of public transit (and by extension, urban infrastructure that relies on people sharing space generally) is so gross and distrustful and condescending. I hate the idea that people like this are trying to shape the design of cities. [twitter.com]

“[The paperclip maximizer AI] scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.” [twitter.com]

19 December

Stated as if it were a bad thing 🙄 I’m not so keen on Facebook automagically building a database on me without my consent, which is of course what they’re doing even though I don’t have a Facebook account [twitter.com]

As you read all the “move along, nothing to see here” tech-blog posts on Apple slowing down old iPhones, keep in mind that the company’s PR strategy involves cultivating friendly reporters and freezing out those who criticize it.

The problem with that is that the majority of people coming in w battery issues have software or usability problems, not a hardware problem. It would also cause repair times to balloon when they’d like repairs done within 30-60 mins

22 December

I would always have picked better performance over better battery life, because a portable battery pack is an easy thing to tote — and it would have been obvious that a new battery was needed; you can’t work around an artificially strangled CPU — you have to buy a new device

@jack et al. are likely of a common tech-male neo-Libertarian mindset (with not-subtle undertones of misogyny and racism) to let anyone say anything, disregarding the human costs, as long as their metrics go up. [twitter.com]